3,5 months ago we opened the application phase for the seif Awards 2015. Like the last 4 years, this time around too the whole seif team has gone through an emotional roller coaster.
Will we get any applications? From where will they come? Will the cases be good?
You really kept us on the edge of our seats till the end: As the graph shows, you all seemed too busy to save the world first – the majority of applicants waited until the very last minute to submit.
But after the nail-biting last days and little sleep for our IT guy we were thrilled about the new record:
170 applications from 35 countries for the seif Awards 2015!
A big thank you to all the wonderful cases who applied! Thanks for taking the time and for telling us about you. We are excited to learn about each one of you!
Any first conclusions?
We are in the middle of the jury process and have had a first look at all the business plans. No decisions are made yet, but we can already say the following:
- The quality and level of professionalism of the submitted business plans is very impressive. There were even a number of applications that we have not seen for the first time – we were happy to see that all of them improved significantly!
- If we compare with the business plans submitted in the first years of the seif Awards, we can identify a huge development when it comes to measuring and presenting the social impact.
- The applications come from all sectors and fields. This represents the general enormous diversity in the social entrepreneurship sector. We received applications from impressive technology innovations, from creative food waste solutions and innovative e-health business concepts. From local community projects as well as projects with a global scale. From organisations that have been running for years and ones that only started a few months back.
The diversity blows our mind. We are curious how the jury will cope with the challenge of selecting the most promising social entrepreneurship projects from this bunch of innovations.